-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031@aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@saipantribune.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 15, 2013 4:36 am
Subject: ST Monday OpEd: President's Day

The humanity of US Presidents

It is Presidents’ Day. Top ten on a survey list: 1) Abe Lincoln abolished slavery, 2) FDR got working America back on its heels, 3) George Washington created a citizen president, 4) Thomas Jefferson doubled US size with Louisiana purchase, 5) common man Andrew Jackson proved humble beginnings hinders no one, 6) trust buster TR v. corrupt business, also committed deeply to conservation, 7) Woodrow Wilson led America out of isolation, 8) Harry Truman made hard decisions including the use of the A-bomb, 9) James K. Polk acquired CA, NM, OR, as manifest destiny, and 10) Ike Eisenhower presided over America’s post-WWII economic prosperity.

In the topography of consciousness, we delineate three sides of the same reality. One is the social process perspective that engages economic support of human existence, the political organization of decision-making, the cultural significance and meaning of every human endeavor, and to balance the process that impacts and determines actions and deeds.

Science of late has been pushing the second perspective, a planetary one that zeroes in on ecological state and well being of the earth, metaphorically rendered as the global brain in Gaia’s journey. Since the blue orb created the celebrated image of the earthrise, this perspective has gained common currency.

E.g., groups of Christian faithful are engaged this Lent season in carbon fast, a conscious curtailing of carbon emission by prudent individual practices. With an Easter resurrection theme, measures like collaboratively planting trees are undertaken to create natural carbon-catching processes. In our own thinking, we refer to the social and planetary part of the trichotomy as eco-democracy.

The third category is the human, a ten thousand year journey in the backdrop of a 4.5 billion year old evolving planet, where the sense, feelings, thoughts, and resolve of a unit of consciousness has entered the discourse of history, sociology, and psychology.

Enuff of the theoretics! Tuesday evening in America, President Barack Obama delivered SOTU 2013. How human is our President? He began with a JFK quote: “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power, but partners for progress… It is my task to report the state of the union. To improve it is the task of us all.”

The president who spent most of his first term dealing with a recalcitrant and gridlocked Congress, he continued on a forceful and consistent “Yes, we can” theme.

In a literary cadence, now familiar to many, he declared: It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.

It is -- it is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country, the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like or who you love.

It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few, that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation.

Then in a facilitative as well as prescriptive leadership style that excites many, and infuriates not a few, he romped with a Fix-it-First program on public works, a slew of advances on deficit reduction and tax reform, the need for urgent immigration measures and the revitalization of the middle class , early learning and technical-vocational education, gun legislation and private sector collaboration, the paycheck and women’s rights, et al. Coming from nowhere, he hit a well aimed surprise homerun with an invitation for Congress to raise the minimum wage to $9 from its current level of $7.25. (I imagined some tremor from weaker knees in the Marianas Trench!)

He touched on a wide range of issues including extremist groups (al Qaeda) and counterterrorism, the end of US presence in Afghanistan (though he failed to mention, in our view, a grave moral contradiction, the use of the drone), reduction of nuclear arsenals (Russia), inhibiting others from gaining one (Iran), and preparing for those who threaten to use one (the hermit kingdom of DPRK).

The adrenalin flow of the night was, however, the highlighted presence of many folks mentioned in the speech, including those affected by violence victimized by gun violence, not the least of whom was one of the audience’s former member, assassination incapacitated survivor Gabrielle Gifford of Arizona. Obama did not push for a particular legislation; only that legislation already in docket deserves a vote. On the note, the SOTU almost turned into a participative Rock Festival!

Now’s the time to do it. Now’s the time to get it done, he thundered again and again. The speech is a tour de force, at once, presidential and impassioned speech, a confident human resolve of imaginative proportions. We are partisan on record on this one. But it is not that the President is human. It is that we are invited to be human in the same vein.

j'aime la vie

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!